How We Plan Our Travel
We’re now in our fifth month of full time travel, so I thought this would be a good time to chat about how we created our 2025 itinerary. While our approach works for us for long term travel, most of it also applies to vacation planning!
Avoiding hitting the wall with travel was important to us from the start. That’s not to say we won’t have stressful travel days, but our goal is to minimize them! The way we’ve chosen to do full time travel differs from many others. For us, it isn’t about checking countries off the list or going to all the most Instagramable sites. We like slow travel. We want to maximize our time in Europe and the UK. We want to feel like we know a city. And since we’re both still working right now, this works great for us.
For much of this first year we’re taking a 3x1 approach for most of the year. Three cities in one country with train or bus travel between the cities and minimal flying between countries. In addition, each year, we’re budgeting for one week long vacation. Vacation you may be asking yourself? If you travel full time, why in the world would you need a vacation? Its pretty simple. A break from cooking each meal with 5 simple ingredients or less, a break from hand washing dishes, a break from work, a break from thinking and planning! We have this year’s vacation booked and are already planning for next year!
Our 2025 Slow Travel Itinerary
So what does 2025 look like for us?
Jan/Feb: Mexico - Puerto Vallarta
Feb/May: Portugal - Porto, Nazaré, Olhão
May/Aug: Great Britain - Boverton Wales, Hebden Bridge, Margate, London
Aug/Sep: Hungary - Budpest
Sep: Vacation!! Danube River Cruise on Avalon Waterways
Sep/Nov: France - Obernai/Strasborg, Reims
Nov/Dec: USA to see all the family for the holidays!
As you can see, we scheduled three months in Mexico, three months in Portugal, and three months in the UK. Then it is vacation time! We booked a Danube River cruise in September with Eric’s parents! So we’ll have 10 days in Budapest before we board the cruise. This will be our first new country this year and we’re excited to explore Budapest and Hungary. From there we’ll get to France, where we’ll spend our remaining 2 1/2 months before coming back to the US for the holidays.
Visa Requirements
One big factor in determining our schedule is visa requirements. Most countries on mainland Europe are in the Schengen Zone. We can only stay in the Schengen Zone 90 out of 180 days. So that means after 3 months, we have to get out. And we have to wait 3 months to get back in. As an example, we entered Portugal on February 15. That means that by May 13, we need to get out of Europe. There’s a handy calculator we use to make sure we don’t overstay our welcome! Lucky for us, the UK isn’t part of the Schengen and they allow 6 month stays! Right now we didn’t have to apply for a visa before we arrived in Europe. However in 2026, the EU will start the ETIAS visa. We’ll need to apply online ahead of time and that will digitally track how long we’ve been there, instead of just relying on our passport stamps for verification. The UK just implemented something similar with the ETA. We applied for that online in February and we got an immediate approval. If you’re traveling to the UK or to Europe in 2026 make sure you’ve applied! Easy Peasy!
Chosing a Country and City
So, how did we pick the countries and the cities? It comes down to lots and lots of research. It starts with what countries we want to “live” in for 3 months. We think about safety, culture, what country we may eventually want to live in longer term, weather, and of course cost! Not all countries or cities are budget friendly and it all has to balance out for our annual budget. We don’t want to see snow.
We knew Portugal, France, Spain, and Italy were high on our list of places we wanted to really get to know. Thankfully, outside of the biggest cities, those countries are all surprisingly affordable! From there we have another list of countries where maybe we’d spend a month. That includes places in the Schengen like Croatia, Poland, Slovenia, Greece and Denmark. And non Schengen countries like Turkey, Albania and Montenegro. And of course, we can always use the UK as a landing place between Schengen stays. Eventually, when working across timezones isn’t a concern, we want to explore SE Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
From there, we look at cities. Sometimes I just surf the Airbnb site to see if I can find anything within our budget that meets our criteria! Most importantly we have to be able to get to, and live in that city with public transportation. While we may rent cars occasionally (if budget allows) for weekends, 90% of the time we’ll be carless. We need to get to a city by plane, train, or bus within our budget. And we need to be able to walk to grocery stores and markets from our Airbnb.
Next week I’ll detail more about what we look for in an Airbnb, and why we’re using that platform pretty much exclusively for our month long stays this year. We’ve definitely had some hits and some misses! At this point we have all of our lodging booked for the rest of 2025.
Transportation
For plane tickets, we’re typically booking 3-6 months in advance. I start with Google Flights. I highly recommend this as a research tool for vacation planning too! It will show you all the options and prices, and you can sign up for a tracker/email alert to monitor prices. However I always book flights directly on the airline website. If anything happens to my reservation, I only want to be dealing directly with the airline and never with a travel aggregator like Expedia.
From my business travels and savvy credit card usage in the past, we’ve racked up quite a few frequent flyer miles across Delta and our credit cards. If you like to travel, I’d highly recommend picking the right travel card for your needs! Delta was perfect for us for the last 15 years because I was able to use my personal card for my business travel and achieve a high status and earn a lot of miles. Now that we’re flying less (ironically?) and not loyal to a specific airline, we’ve switched to American Express Platinum and Chase Sapphire Preferred. Both give us lounge access (IYKYK) and earn us points that we can transfer to a wide variety of airlines. Our goal is to pay out of pocket for flights within Europe and the UK because fares are so inexpensive. And for our long haul flights we’ll try to use points for Comfort/Premium Economy seats.
We’ll book most train and bus tickets a few weeks in advance, depending on if we can buy assigned seats on that service or not. I typically research on Rome2Rio for my options. Similar to Google Flights, it will give you all transportation options between two cities. For trains, I’ll typically then book on the national rail site for that country. Buses can vary between national services or interntational services like FlixBus. We used FlixBus from Porto to Nazaré and it was super easy! The 2 1/2 hour bus ride was $6.50 per person! We added on assigned seats for $5.00 per person since it was our first time booking with them, but I don’t think we’ll do that in the future.
Excursions and Day Trips
Lastly, I’ll research excursions/day trips from our location. This could include organized tours where we pay a guide to take us on a tour or a DIY version that we put together ourselves. We love to book food tours when we are in a new country. Learning about local cuisine, customs like tipping, how to order, and tips for other great restaurants in the area are invaluable when you are in a new place. I typically research on Viator or GetYourGuide, but I often book directly on the local companies website so they make more money off my ticket! Sometimes we’ll book day long guided trips in order to access multiple sites in one day or to do something like a bike tour or kayaking. The nice thing about booking through Viator or GetYourGuide is you often don’t have to prepay for your excursion and you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance.
But often, particularly if we’re staying in a smaller city, we’ll see what other cities are in the area and find our own transportation there to explore. Our daily walks Monday-Thursday mornings cover the town we’re staying in, so on the weekends we’re ready to explore outside our town. While we miss some of the narrative you get with a tour guide, we can be flexible with our time and stay longer or shorter than the guided tour might have been. We’ll also look for available hiking in the area. That is our plan in the UK to explore Wales and West Yorkshire where walks through the beautiful countryside are plentiful.
I typically start researching our excursions and day trips 2 months out and book within 2-3 weeks of when we want to do the activity.
Tools For Planning Travel
I use three main tools outside of the websites mentioned above.
I use a master Google Sheet for our overall itenerary and to track what is booked and placeholders for what is still needed. For the current year, I have rows for every transportation item and accommodation. This also aids in our budgeting so we can help predict what expensive we still have for the rest of the year. I have tabs for each year. Future years is a bit messy, as we’re constantly adding ideas! My goal is to have a firm schedule 6-9 months in advance. Some full time travelers are much more spontaneous, often not knowing where they’ll be the next week, let alone the next month. At least for this first year, that is not us! In order to keep stress levels low, we like to plan ahead and know what is coming! I look at this Google Sheet daily!
Next I use Apple Notes. I have notes for everything! One for groceries, one for the address and wifi of our current accomodation. One for each place we’ll be visiting. This is my “scratch pad” where I put links to websites, ideas from other blogs, lists of must see attractions, etc. These get edited daily or weekly as well.
Finally, we use a shared Google calendar for all our transportation bookings, airbnb bookings, and excursions. That gives us a good visual reminder of where we need to be when!
Have you booked your summer vacation yet? Or are you ready to now? The world is calling! Come explore